


blood ties

by 24bookworm68



Series: family matters [1]
Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV), Captain America (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Becca's awesome, Biracial Character, Brother-Sister Relationships, Character(s) of Color, Commandos are family, F/F, F/M, Jewish Bucky Barnes, Loss of Faith, Loss of Innocence, Multi, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Single Parents, Sister-Sister Relationship, Strong Female Characters, Team as Family, all of Bucky's sisters are awesome, god i need a drink, i love Becca Barnes, i mean the ending is, i never knew i shipped Becca with Morita?, i'm just tagging all the tags, long-winded Becca Barnes character study, the non-con is implied i promise, their daughter the punk rock lesbian, this sucker spans like ninety years fuck off, who don't have to be strong all the time
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-18
Updated: 2014-09-18
Packaged: 2018-02-17 21:05:28
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,390
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2323163
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/24bookworm68/pseuds/24bookworm68
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bucky Barnes is ninety-seven, and some very bad people have done some very bad things to make him forget. Becca looks at him, says, “Aw, Buck,” and drags him inside to wash the blood off of his hands.</p>
            </blockquote>





	blood ties

**Author's Note:**

> this is. i have no excuse for this. it's a big rambly mess of Becca Barnes headcanons i'm so sorry i am so.

March of 1929, Becca Barnes turns twelve, which means she gets to be an adult an entire year before her brother Bucky, which she teases him about for a full three months before their birthday and eight after.

October of 1929 the stock market crashes and Becca starts home from the library too late and a man pulls her into an alleyway and does things she won’t ever be able to erase from her mind. Once she’s over the shock, horrified and hurting and traumatized, she stabs him with a pen and runs home.

Bucky finds her standing just inside the door shaking with her skirt and her hands bloody and her hair disheveled. He says, “Aw, Bec,” and drags her off, rinses the blood off of her hands and doesn’t touch her any more than he needs to. She doesn’t tell him she’s grateful for it and he doesn’t tell her he’s worried about her, but they both know.

The Great Depression starts, Rebecca Barnes loses her faith in God and stops looking her parents in the eyes. Her little sisters, Miriam at nine and Naomi at six, don’t notice anything wrong and she wants to keep it that way.

Eight years later she sits in front of those little girls, seventeen and fourteen, and reassures them that just because their parents are gone doesn’t mean they won’t be taken care of, and Bucky chews on his nails and tries not to look anxious but she marks the stops and skips in his words and thinks _who the hell do you think you’re fooling, Buck?_ and he shoots her this barely-steady smirk that answers _fuckin nobody, Bec_.

Becca steps out of her shell for the sake of her family, and Bucky withdraws, keeps orbiting around Steve Rogers like he’s the sun, like he has for fourteen years, and every time Becca sees her brother he looks just a touch skinnier, shoulders drooping a bit more. She isn’t there to notice, but Miriam and Naomi tell her Bucky’s stopped going to Shul and the next time she sees him she raises an eyebrow at him but doesn’t really bring it up and he gives her a look like she’s got no room to talk. Which, she doesn’t.

Becca went from semi-devout to nonbeliever in the space of a night, Bucky lost what little faith he ever had in bits and pieces, but they ended up at the same place like they always do. She comforts herself with that when she feels like she’s losing him.

And then six months before the war in Europe ends she _does_ lose him and the only thing that stands out in the rush of pain in her head is _we won’t even be able to bury him_. Miriam, who Becca has long thought of as the softest of all of them, bites down on her knuckle until there’s blood on her teeth and follows Naomi into Becca’s bathroom where she’s throwing up her guts. Becca watches them go and wonders if she’s allowed to fall apart now that they can take care of themselves.

She probably is, but she doesn’t.

Steve follows Bucky and she’s blindingly jealous for about a half a minute where missing her brother overrules wanting to be alive. And then she shakes it off, because Barneses are survivors and she has already fought too hard to exist for losing Bucky to be the thing that takes her out.

The Howling Commandos come to give their condolences, four out of the five try to comfort her. Morita looks her dead in the eye and says “It’s a damn shame, Barnes.” and she decides she likes how blunt he is. Miriam tells her later that she thinks he’s horribly rude and Naomi doesn’t care about any of them, can’t stand to look at the men who made it home instead of her brother or the man who may as well have been. He tells her to call him Jim and she says only if he calls her Becca.

Three months later and he’s the second man to touch her the way he does, and the first she lets do it. He says “Sarge is gonna haunt me for this,” around a cigarette.

She tells him, “If Bucky knew anything he knew he couldn’t control me.” He shrugs, nods, and they go for round two.

Naomi finds out she’s pregnant in the summer when she’s twenty-two and she and her husband shine with the news and it’s enough to pull her out of the spiral of her grief. Becca finds out in the winter when she’s twenty-eight and decides to move somewhere where nobody knows her and start over. Anywhere but Fresno, California. Her daughter Winifred B. Barnes’s pretty blue eyes are slanted just enough to be noticeable and her thick curls are blue-black and the people on the streets of the easy suburb Becca moves them into watch her with poorly-disguised disdain. Becca puts pictures of her brother and sisters and her nephew James on their walls and tells her baby girl as soon as she’s old enough to understand that if anybody hurts her she should hurt them back.

Freddie comes back from her first day of kindergarten with a black eye and a rip in her dress and flashes her mom a toothy grin. Becca takes her out for ice cream.

Naomi names her second child Stephanie. Miriam sends letters from California where she’s living with a gal pal named Rose and says she doesn’t want her sisters to call her Mirele any more. Naomi tells Becca she can’t keep her daughter from her heritage. Or her father. Becca tells her she doesn’t know shit and Freddie’s fine thanks very much.

She gives her daughter the option of faith in the God she no longer wants anything to do with anyway, falls into the rituals her mother and father passed on like putting on an old, soft sweater.

In 1955 the Commandos all get together and invite the Barnes girls and Jim Morita watches his daughter with a suspicious look in his eyes and pulls Becca aside while all the kids are playing to ask if she’s his and she tells him he already knows the answer to that. He asks if she wants help and she tells him she’s never in her life relied on a man and doesn’t plan to start now. She doesn’t stop him from going over and talking to their little girl, though.

In the sixties, Becca is middle-aged and her little girl is a woman and the two of them march hand in hand to make the world a little more equal and Freddie steps in front of a policeman’s gun in a protest against a war that doesn’t sit right with either of them and the barrel lowers nice and slow. Freddie beams with flowers in her hair and the headlines read that a war hero’s niece is involved with all the protests and Becca thinks about all the ways in which her daughter is the best version of herself that she could never be.

In 1965 they all get together again and everyone pats everyone else on the back because if there is anything the people Steve Rogers surrounded himself with and their families have in common it’s that they are willing to pay the price of freedom for everyone. Becca finds her little girl kissing Diane Jones and doesn’t say a word. Freddie gets a pat on the back from her father and Diane gets her sister telling her, with a laugh, that she should know by now how much trouble that Barnes girl is.

Becca has distanced herself enough from the tragedies of the end of the second World War enough to go to Arlington and sit at graves where Bucky and Steve weren’t really buried and let her thoughts into the air. Neither of them saw thirty and they’d be bored with an old lady’s thoughts on the world, but she talks anyway and lets them know that if they want to interrupt they’re welcome to it.

She runs into Miriam on her next trip up, who reveals in a soft voice that as soon as the tombstones were placed she came down here and whispered the Kaddish over Bucky’s grave and some Catholic prayer that she got from a priest over Steve’s and she’s been back every week since. “I think he woulda sighed over how much I was butchering the Latin though,” She confesses, nodding at the tombstone on the right. “And Bucky woulda laughed at me.”

Becca sighs and ruffles her little sister’s hair. “Only matters that you tried, Mirele.”

“Don’t call me that, you old hag.” She responds.

It’s the last time Becca sees her.

At the next big old extended family reunion, the Commandos and the Barneses raise a toast to “A damn strong lady who would’ve been mad as hell if any of us were crying.” They pretend that there’s a dry eye in the whole place and they all drink more than they should. Becca finds a nice dark corner and kisses Jim Morita for the first time since 1945 and Freddie catches them at it and wonders aloud if this means her parents are finally gonna get married.

Becca tells her there’s no way in hell and she says she figured as much.

For the fourth big Commandos & Co. reunion, Peggy Carter and Howard Stark finally decide to show up. Howard doesn’t bring his family along. Naomi looks at Peggy and says, “My brother thought the world of you.”

She frowns, confused, “I didn’t think Sergeant Barnes ever wrote home about me.”

And when Naomi says, “Nah, I didn’t mean _Bucky_ ,” Director Carter looks down, sets her jaw, and nods sharply before she tosses back her glass of gin.

A couple of the kids from the first of these gatherings have kids of their own- James is bouncing a baby on his knee and Maggie Triplett nee Jones has a toddler in each arm, Antoine and Delphine, and there are five more that Becca isn’t sure who they belong to, running around and shrieking in four different languages and they’re family, is the thing, despite the lack of blood, and Becca looks at Peggy and says, “You could be a regular part of this. There’s always room for Agent Carter with the Commandos.”

“I’ve tried very hard to make sure my life wasn’t about my connection to them, after the war.” She says, like she didn’t marry Gabe Jones. Like she didn't start an intelligence agency with Howard Stark and Tim Dugan. Like she didn’t make damn sure Bucky Barnes and Steve Rogers had their names on memorials in every SHIELD facility despite dying long before the agency existed. Becca lets it pass.

Jim Morita dies in 1987 and in 1988 Becca marries a man named Ben Proctor despite the fact that they’re both seventy and not all that much in love- well, maybe he is, but she just needs to leave the memory of a man she could’ve loved in the dust. Freddie’s adopted daughter is the flower girl at the wedding and Naomi is the Matron of Honor. Becca treks her creaky bones out to Arlington and tells the boys she’s finally settled down and can almost hear Bucky say _yeah right, little sister_. She goes to Miriam’s grave and tells her that of all of them, she thought Naomi’d be the only one who died unmarried, and she thinks about checking up on Rose- the last she heard the woman hadn’t moved from the apartment she and Miriam made their own.

Howard Stark only makes it to the one Commandos reunion, dies in a car crash with his wife in the early nineties. The team tries to support their little boy but he rejects it violently, throws himself into drink and partying and sleeping around, and they all exchange worried looks when they get together. Becca has been on this planet for seven and a half decades and she still doesn’t know how to save stupid boys from themselves.

When she’s ninety-four, they find Steve Rogers in the arctic and she sits in her new apartment in Brooklyn, a widow twice but only once officially who’s on the way to losing her last sibling, and she waits. He’ll come to her eventually.

Eventually is after aliens invade the city, which is weird, and she grips her shotgun while she watches the news because she will be damned if anything but old age ends her, after how hard she’s fought to stick around.

Steve Rogers shows up in her doorway the day after with that same sheepish smile he had when he was nearly a foot shorter and more than a hundred pounds lighter. “Hey, Becca, can I come in?” He asks, voice shaking, and that’s all he has it in him to say, apparently, because as soon as she nods and leads him over to the couch he sits down hard and gasps in these big breaths that mean he’s trying not to cry.

“How long’s it been for you?” She asks, and he doesn’t need to ask what she means.

“Three months,” He whispers.

She sighs, frowns, presses a kiss to the top of his head like one of her earliest memories reports seeing his mother do. “You poor kid.” She mumbles, and then he’s crying in earnest, whispering that he’s _so sorry Becca really_ , and she just sits with him. It’s been three months. It’s been seventy years.

He promises to write from D.C., where he’s moving to work for SHIELD. Her reassurances that he doesn’t have to go and take their orders is met with a self-deprecating smile she knows in her bones and a question of what else he’s supposed to do that he leaves before she can answer.

A couple of years later Naomi dies, SHIELD collapses, Captain America is put in the hospital, and a familiar figure shows up on the fire escape.

Bucky Barnes is ninety-seven, and some very bad people have done some very bad things to make him forget. Becca looks at him, says, “Aw, Buck,” and drags him inside to wash the blood off of his hands.


End file.
